


Between the Rains

by SinningVirtue



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vietnam, Lt. Calley, M/M, My Lai
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-03
Updated: 2013-06-03
Packaged: 2017-12-13 21:39:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/829165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SinningVirtue/pseuds/SinningVirtue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometime between the rains, Dean becomes Vietnam.</p>
<p>He eats and trades his C-rations and he smokes his cigarettes, and the dope the men don’t bother to hide, and he smiles at the sky and he laughs and it’s good.</p>
<p>And then there is Castiel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Between the Rains

**Author's Note:**

> My Lai and the events described in March of 1968 actually occurred. Lieutenant Calley was real. He served three and a half years house arrest for his part in the murder of between three and five hundred Vietnamese civilians. He was the only one prosecuted.

“You don’t have to go.”

 

Sam looks down at Dean, and Dean can remember looking down at him. Young boy, fragile looking until he grew into his big talk at sixteen. Now he’s all broad shoulders and too-long hair. Starting to look like one of the protestors down at the university.

 

“Of course I do,” Dean says, and his voice is quiet. It’s hushed like the night in early spring, before all the crickets wake up.

 

The Impala is still warm beneath them, and the stars are all laid out before their eyes.

 

Sam fists his hair in his long fingers, and Dean thinks his eyes are too shiny.

 

“No you don’t! Canada. Dean, go to Canada!” There’s something young in that voice, and suddenly they are children, and Sam is explaining why there is, indeed, a Santa Claus. Sam grips his shoulders, and Dean blinks at those ever changing eyes and sees the panic.

 

If Dean knew a god, he would pray to it.

 

“You know I can’t,” he whispers. The darkness presses up against him. Makes this easier. “I don’t. I don’t want to leave you with John. But Sammy, there’s nothin’ I can do. Guys like me can’t dodge Uncle Sam. There is no college, there is no Canada.”

 

The silence swells between them, and Dean thinks about catching fireflies when he was young.

 

“Please. This war’s wrong. You can’t--”

 

Sam’s voice is thick and wet.

 

There is nothing left for Dean to say, not really. He slips an arm over his younger brother’s shoulders, and pulls him close, like he used to after John drank too much and smashed in the windows.

 

“Sammy,” he says.

 

It’s enough.

 

Xx

 

His fingers trace the Impala in the slow heat of the afternoon.

 

“I won’t change if you don’t, baby,” he whispers.

 

That’s good. That promise. It’s good.

 

Xx

 

Dean doesn’t believe in a god; his mother’s been dead more than a decade now and his father’s been lost to the demons at the bottom of a bottle and Sam’s trapped in this town and he’s going to war.

 

But he wanders into church one day. His leather jacket clings to his broad shoulders as he bends in the cage a pew. He prays.

 

Xx

 

“You come home.”

 

Dean smiles up at Sam, and his eyes catch the light and look, for a moment, shot through with the brightest gold.

 

Sam will remember that.

 

Xx

 

No one ever told him they could hit you.

 

That they could make you stand outside base camp in the swampy heat of Fort Wood and let the mosquitos take pints of your blood, staring out into the darkness without slapping a single one down.

 

The cocky, turned up smile gets beat out of him quick.

 

Xx

 

“Charlie is gonna get at least ten of you. Guaranteed,” Captain Rogers said brightly.

 

Long Binh Post wasn’t really Vietnam. You weren’t in the war yet. Just a stop on the road to Pinkville.

 

That’s what people told them as they made a temporary home there.

 

“It’s up to you to decide which one of you gets wasted. Who’s the smarter? Who watches their fucking step?” They will be assigned their companies and ship off to different parts of the country in the next week. They will enter the war.

 

Dean has never been light on his feet.

 

Xx

 

In Charlie Company, you rarely know anyone by their real name.

 

For the first week he was nothing, while consensus drummed up on his nickname. He was not asked his real name until the next supply drop. Tradition for new grunts.

 

Texas watches him from behind the screen of the jungle as he takes to his first patrol. Ices his first VC.

 

Calls him Righteous. A Natural.

 

Xx

 

Napalm isn’t like they say it is.

 

The smell sinks into your skin, and you carry it with you like you carry your helmet or your gun. The chemical, gasoline texture of it infects the whites of your eyes and the calluses on your fingertips and the jungle hums with it.

 

Dean thinks about the sweet drift of motor oil from the garage back in Kansas, and that’s almost good enough. That almost does it.

 

Xx

 

There’s a child curled in the embers of a village.

 

Her arms are stained black and she’s stopped crying.

 

Charlie Company plays with her hair, and Lt. Calley finally dumps her down the well, to keep the VC from coming back. The tainted water will never really be right to drink.

 

Dean swings his M-16 high and low again, and takes aim at the jungle arching around them.

 

He wants to destroy something beautiful.

 

He settles by placing his hand on the lip of the well when all the rest are sweeping the edges of the village for tunnels. “Hey Jude, don’t make it bad. Just take a sad song and make it better.”

 

He thinks his voice might echo off the mountains up north, and sound like a hollowed out lullaby.

 

Xx

 

Sometime between the rains, Dean becomes Vietnam.

 

He eats and trades his C-rations and he smokes his cigarettes, and the dope the men don’t bother to hide, and he smiles at the sky and he laughs and it’s good.

 

“Righteous Man, what are you gonna do when you see the whites of ol’Charlie’s eyes?”

 

Dean flicks his lighter in the dark, daring a sniper somewhere in the trees.

 

“Get biblical.”

 

Xx

 

The river comes high.

 

It is not much against the heat.

 

The sky has opened up from its slate grey canvas in the past month, and there are no clouds. There is nothing to hide behind on the rice paddy. The sun beats against them, the only enemy they can really see.

 

The blue is huge and it swallows their cigarette smoke, licks it away with the soft whisper of an almost-breeze.

 

If you look up, it’s just like Kansas.

 

Dean catches his breath, and the toothpick he worries between his teeth nearly snaps. The mud beneath his boots is sucking suddenly. It threatens to pull him deeper, chest-high.

 

He pulls against it.

 

Out.

 

His M-16 is heavy slung over his shoulders.

 

His green eyes trace the jungle line.

 

“Watch your six, boys!” he shouts.

 

A worn photo in his breast pocket shifts with his movements, and he can just feel the edges through his shirt.

 

It is almost peaceful, here, he thinks. In these moments.

 

When it’s just the men and the river and the sun, and the slow, shallow breathing of water buffalo by the shore.

 

Charlie fires from the banks of the river, hidden in jungle shadow.

 

They never see Charlie when he’s a’comin up through Pinkville.

 

Dean fires, stays as low as he can without submerging his pack. The water turns white with the force of a platoon dodging fire.

 

Bill Peterson is face down, bobbing. Red leeches into the water like smoke.

 

His burned out cigarette swells with wetness as it slips from slack lips.

 

Xx

 

“Righteous Man got biblical on those fucking VC, didn’t even see the fucker coming.”

 

Dean draws his fingers up along the lip of his foxhole; the dirt crushes beneath his fingertips. He thinks he would know this earth for the rest of his life. Know how it tastes and how to breathe around it.

 

“Never see us coming, Charlie Company’s got the gooks cornered,” he says, his rough voice skating across the stars.

 

“Got ‘em cornered!” Parker shouts, jumping and hollering around the foxholes, yanking up other men into his mad dance. “Charlie Company’s got ‘em cornered!”

 

Dean falls asleep easily.

 

Xx

 

In Da Nang, the ocean sings them to sleep, the sandy mines haunt their breathing, and Dean sleeps with a woman he can’t name.

 

Her skin looks almost pale gold in the moonlight.

 

She arches to him and her voice is high and full of wonder.

 

He loves her. For the whole night.

 

He loves her.

 

In the morning, he leaves a tin of C-rations for pay by her straw bed, and slips back into the morning.

 

Xx

 

“Pappa-San, we’ll call you a dust-off copter when you tell us where the fucking tunnels are,” Calley says, gripping the front of the old man’s shirt. The aged, folded skin of his face is caked with mud and dirt.

 

It must be hard to breathe around.

 

Dean stands quietly and watches the man crumble to his knees.

 

He spits blood.

 

“No tunnel.”

 

“Yes tunnel,” Calley hisses, his round, bitter face pressed close to the old man’s.

 

Dean steps from Parker’s side; his nineteen year old frame looks so slight before Calley’s M-16. “He doesn’t know any tunnels. This village is dry, Calley, let’s move on,” he says. His voice is bigger than he feels.

 

Lieutenant Calley’s nose is only centimeters from his.

 

“Didn’t they teach you anything in boot camp, grunt? Can’t trust a gook, can’t let a gook go. They don’t know shit, they seen it. Now fall back in line, soldier!”

 

Dean goes quietly, his green-gold eyes tracing the stooped back of the old man.

 

He struggles with English for a moment, his mouth tasting out the words, before he looks at Dean and says, “There…are mines around the well.” He looks at Dean while he says it.

 

Dean nods, and nudges Tex to call for the medevac.

 

Calley watches him coldly while he does it.

 

“Righteous Man really is righteous,” Tex mutters.

 

“Savin’ souls,” Parker agrees.

 

“Righteous Man is bringin’ his holy mission to the jungle. Gonna save all of Pinkville.”

 

Forty minutes later, John Dayton gets his leg blown off by a mine surrounding the well.

 

Xx

 

Dean kills a child.

 

He had a gun pointed at Dean’s face.

 

Dean kills a child.

 

He sleeps well that night.

 

Xx

 

The guy’s small.

 

They pick him up on their next supply drop.

 

The guy’s small and his eyes are a shocking kind of blue. The kind that cuts through bone and muscle and opens you up to the sky. That kind of blue.

 

Dean’s never seen that kind of blue before.

 

Xx

 

The guy pulls him out of the way of a mine.

 

Dean claps him on the back and wishes he has more to say than “Thanks man.”

 

But he doesn’t.

 

Xx

 

The guy has a Bible, and he reads it when the light’s soft and creeps through the screen of the jungle. His lips move soundlessly with the words, and Dean almost envies the peace that falls into his eyes when he closes the book.

 

No one asks for his name, and he doesn’t tell anyone. It’s the rule.

 

He’s new until the next supply drop, new until he sees action, and then they give him a nickname.

 

That’s the rule.

 

But he looks at Dean sometimes, from the edge of a rice paddy, and something warm and sudden curls in his stomach. And he thinks, this guy.

 

This guy hasn’t seen napalmed children writhing in a charred village, or gunned down a woman with a grenade. He hasn’t watched boys be sucked under by the mud.

 

This guy still believes in angels, in souls.

 

At the next supply drop, he wanders over. The guy’s watching the sky. Dean passes him a tin of canned peaches, and snatches his apples for pay.

 

“Righteous Man, you gonna get biblical on this guy?” Parker asks with a grin, shoving a cigarette between his teeth.

 

Dean laughs, it’s a rough, throaty sound. It wasn’t like that in Kansas.

 

“What’s your name grunt?” Dean asks, finally, and all the guys lean in to hear him speak.

 

“Castiel,” he says. His voice is dragged from the bottom of the ocean, caught up in the wind, it echoes off the chambers of their rib cages.

 

“Cas,” Dean says with finality.

 

It fits. It falls into his eyes and curls there.

 

Cas’s lips twitch upwards.

 

Xx

 

They trade pictures: Sam folded up in his breast pocket and a brother named Gabriel twined in Castiel’s. They talk about heights and smiles and the way Dean’s little brother had a smile that fell from the sky and Gabriel had humor like a Vet’s.

 

It’s nice.

 

Xx

 

“Dean, are you afraid of dying?”

 

Cas is the only one who calls him that. And he says it like it’s something rare and hidden between the trees and the mud and the rain. Dean blinks at him from the lip of a foxhole. The rain speaks in tongues.

 

“Sometimes.”

 

“When?”

 

Dean worries Sam’s latest letter between his fingers; he shelters it from the rain.

 

“When I think about my dad too much.”

 

They don’t talk about it. Dean’s green eyes reflect the dull light, and he thinks about beer bottles and lights going out and voices growing harsh and empty.

 

“Death fucks you up, man. Fucks up the living.”

 

Cas nods softly, his brow furrowed. He crawls forward on his stomach, until his eyes are level with Dean’s and the rain draws patterns on his stubble. “What are you doing here, Dean?” he asks.

 

“Uncle Sam came knocking.” He swallows, it’s thick.

 

“You didn’t even try to avoid it,” Cas states. “You don’t think you deserve to be saved?”

 

Dean lets the silence swallow itself and lets the rain swallow him. He presses the letter to his mouth; it swells with rain.

 

Castiel stays by him through the night.

 

Xx

 

“It is like this/ in death’s other kingdom.”

 

Dean worries a cigarette between his teeth. Takes a slow drag, and thinks back to English classes and Sam’s textbooks.

 

“Eliot.”

 

Castiel nods, an approving spark firing behind his eyes.

 

They take aim at the tree line and fire together.

 

Xx

 

They start to call him Priest.

 

Righteous Man and Priest, running the jungle for God, blowing VC for God.

 

Dean doesn’t have the heart to tell them he doesn’t believe in the man upstairs. Knows most of them don’t anyway. They cling to it though, the holiness of their mission. It lets them all sleep at night. So Dean lets them continue on.

 

He and Cas sit off from the others, trade their C-Rations, and Cas watches Dean smoke. His lungs must be made of ash now. What would Sammy say?

 

“Gonna send that boy to law school,” he says, staring down at his hands.

 

Cas smiles at him, one of those slow-spreading, rare things. “I know you will,” he says, in the same way he talked about God.

 

Xx

 

“You gonna follow me?”

 

“Of course, Dean.”

 

Xx

 

The river comes high.

 

“America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?”

 

“Ginsberg.”

 

They cross to the next bank.

 

Xx

 

There is blood here, beneath his fingernails. Caked into the grooves of his fingerprints, caught and stained into his skin.

 

It’s old. Worn with the handling of rain, but still there.

 

Dean watches smoke plume from the edge of a rice paddy, purple and warm with the desperation of dying men. The wind blows back his hair, it needs to be cut. His bangs are falling in his eyes.

 

A dust-off copter lands carefully on the bank, where the ground is barely solid. The sun dances off of shallow water. A water buffalo grazes a few hundred meters away.

 

The day is blue, for once.

 

Heat curls and slides down along his spine. He breathes.

 

Cas stands beside him, and watches Parker get loaded up. A sheet is over his face.

 

“This war is wrong.”

 

Dean nods, takes a long drag of a cigarette, and watches the smoke join the sky.

 

“Always is.”

 

Xx

 

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”

 

“Tennyson?”

 

“Shakespeare.”

 

Cas bumps shoulders with him, and they advance into fire.

 

Xx

 

The night curls up in their laps and is warm and soft and alive.

 

Dean watches Cas through the darkness, his bedhead kicked up by a slow wind. Their hands shake from firing; the mud has become a part of them. Things have gone quiet, they are the only ones left awake.

 

“I don’t want to die,” Dean says.

 

It’s a secret.

 

Cas looks at him, and thinks Dean’s eyes are gold in this light. He’ll remember that.

 

“Then don’t.”

 

Dean kisses him.

 

Dean pushes him back against the edge of the foxhole, their bodies tangled over each other, the dirt is cool against Cas’ back. For a moment they are just lips and tongues and teeth. For a moment they are wind and rain and fire. They are the jungle and the mountains and they are breaking the sky.

 

Cas arches into Dean’s hands, gasps into his mouth, prays.

 

Dean finds God in the taste of him.

 

The night goes on.

 

Xx

 

Lt. Calley orders the men to kill a water buffalo.

 

Cas has to turn away; the blood blooms into the river. The animal makes a rough coughing noise. The men holler, and dance around it. Dean watches the thing’s knees shake and give out.

 

He thinks about Sam, and the soft way he told Dean to come home. He wonders what he meant by that.

 

Xx

 

“What d’you want?” Dean asks, breathing hot and wet against Cas’ neck.

 

The smaller man bends to him, breathes, and Dean can feel the way his heart stutters. The sounds he makes break him, find their way into his veins and his lungs and stay there. Make a home there.

 

“More,” Cas manages to gasp.

 

Dean bites down on the curve of his neck, resists leaving a mark for some other soldier to see. Their hands feel out secret pieces of each other, and their skin burns.

 

They share breath.

 

“Cas.”

 

Castiel finds home in his bones.

 

Dean communes with angels.

 

Xx

 

My Lai is Pinkville, and Pinkville is VC central. And VC central’s gotta be era-dick-ated.

 

Lt. Calley has a voice that coils down in your soul. They follow him blindly; their guns are heavy. The day is hot. Two or three men in Charlie Company snap candid pictures of the men smoking and singing. Charlie Company’s got ‘em gooks against a wall. Charlie Company’s got ‘em all. Ain’t never seen us comin’, up on through the grass. Never seen us comin’, gonna bite ‘em in the ass.

 

Righteous Man does what he’s told. Priest sticks to his side. College boy with college eyes and college hands. He doesn’t agree with the war, but his M-16 is familiar by now.

 

It’s sometime in March, 1968.

 

Sam hasn’t sent a letter in over a month. Cas has stopped talking so much about God. He even curses some now. Dean’s going to take him to a strip show when they get R&R.

 

The village is empty of VC aged men. Children crowd around the well and their mothers’ skirts and hide their faces. The women lift their chins. Lt. Calley smiles into darkened huts and nods his head.

 

The men spread like smoke through the village. Hell rises up and finds purchase in the pale-gold skin of women’s thighs.

 

“Dean, what do we do?”

 

Dean watches Tex fire at a group of ten year olds. He’s crying while he does it. Shell casings pool around him. Someone takes a picture of the pile the bodies make.

 

He sees the ones laughing, the ones who’ve hogtied women on their straw mattresses, who spit at the old men, weathered by age. A child calls for his brother. He reminds Dean of Sam.

 

Dean throws a punch at someone pulling at the dress of a small woman. Cas knocks him over the head with the butt of his M-16.

 

Cas grips his wrist.

 

“Dean.”

 

“Where’s your God, Cas?” he asks suddenly, pushing Castiel up against a hut, spitting it in his face.

 

There is nothing in his eyes but the reflection of gunfire.

 

Xx

 

They don’t come back to Charlie Company for hours. Until the night has crawled up from its hiding place in the mountains. Dean doesn’t even remember leaving. Knows Cas led him away, muttering what might have been curses. What might have been prayers.

 

Calley doesn’t say anything. No one says anything.

 

Dean fights until they stay a night on the outside of the village, and sets to digging a grave for as many as he can. He digs until the sun rises high. Until his hands blister and bleed. And then he digs more.

 

Xx

 

“Dean.”

 

“Have you ever thought about what you’ll do after?”

 

Cas stands quietly beside him, stares at the graves Dean hasn’t finished. They move out in twenty minutes.

 

“No.”

 

“You oughta think on it.”

 

Xx

 

“Who are you, Cas, really?”

 

Castiel draws his fingers up through Dean’s hair, slow and soft and gentle. They’re lying in the dark against a tarp, snuggled in by the jungle. The men around them either don’t know or don’t care. They’re discreet. They don’t talk about it. They’re in the front lines when Charlie comes a’knocking, so anyone who knows anything keeps it hushed.

 

Dean’s chest burns from all the digging; it’s long over now, but he carries it with him in his muscles. Cas’s hand rests at his shoulder, and it says things that none of them can say. Dean’s changed since Priest unloaded with their C-Rations. The war has slipped out of him, has taken back to the jungle.

 

“I’m the one who raised you from perdition.”

 

“Cas?” Dean asks, hovering over him in the darkness.

 

Castiel smiles, draws his fingers over Dean’s cheekbones. The words stick to the inside of his throat, and Dean doesn’t know how to speak. How to say what he needs to say.

 

“I know.”

 

Xx

 

“Righteous Man, it’s biblical. This is biblical.”

 

Dean traces his M-16 from memory while Tex tells a ghost story. Cas is reading his Bible by starlight.

 

These are the things they have become.

 

Xx

 

“Tours over come next week.”

 

Castiel watches the clouds, watches the glimpses of the stars. He carves mud out of the soles of his boots with a knife.

 

“Kind of want to see the country. Drive it.”

 

There are pieces missing from him he wants to find in Kansas and Colorado and at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and on the west coast. There are pieces of him he wants to leave washed up on sandy mines in Vietnam.

 

Cas nods, and his fingertips trace the veins in Dean’s hands.

 

The jungle bends around them, breathes with them, keeps their secrets.

 

My Lai will be a half buried grave until 1969, and the jungle will swallow the bones of hundreds. The river will take more. Will swallow them. And the mud will erase fingerprints and war stories. And the pieces they leave behind will weather and age like the old, unexploded land mines. The jungle is a language they have learned and become. They are not so afraid.

 

“Come with me?”

 

Cas smiles.


End file.
